Teen Line Career Development Initiative

Mental health

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

Adolescence is a period of profound physical, mental and social change. Teens navigate new experiences—from first dates and first heartbreaks, to balancing homework and extracurriculars or after-school jobs—while feeling pressured to make major decisions about their futures. Being a teenager has never been easy, but today’s teens face unprecedented challenges. The youth mental health crisis continues to make headlines with startling statistics on the rising rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. Over 40% of high schoolers felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, and suicide is the second leading cause of death among people ages 15–24. All youth are affected, but BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and low-income teens encounter unique barriers to accessing mental health care. Compounding matters, many teens resist asking adults for help. However, teens are often willing to talk to each other when they feel lost or frustrated, or simply want to discuss their problems with an empathetic peer.

In July 2022, Didi Hirsch acquired our longtime partner, Teen Line, a peer-to-peer hotline that has provided confidential, nonjudgmental support for youth since 1980. Teen Line serves 6,500 youth annually, with volunteers answering calls, emails and texts every evening from 6–10. Teens reach an empathetic peer (Listener) who actively listens, clarifies and validates their concerns, and discusses options, coping skills and resources. Listeners are supervised by volunteer mental health professionals and complete 65 hours of intensive training before staffing the hotline. We also provide community education on how to recognize the warning signs of a mental health crisis.
This grant will support Didi Hirsch’s effort to provide our Listener experience to youth from under-represented backgrounds who would otherwise have difficulty participating. We encourage Listeners (about 140 annually) to become mental health ambassadors in their communities and explore future careers in the field. To help diversify the field, we piloted a Career Development Initiative at Montebello’s Applied Technology Center (ATC), a majority low-income Latinx high school, training students to work as Listeners. The second cohort began training at ATC in March. Training and shifts take place on campus, reducing the barriers associated with commuting. Modest stipends are disbursed quarterly to participating students to alleviate the hardship of choosing volunteerism over paid employment.

Didi Hirsch’s groundbreaking services have changed thousands of lives over the last 80+ years. Our Career Development Initiative represents a crucial next chapter in this legacy, through which we will help cultivate a mental health workforce who genuinely understands the diverse needs and interests of tomorrow’s youth. Our short-term goal is for youth contacting Teen Line to reach a peer whose background reflects their own. Longer-term, we hope more students from under-represented backgrounds will pursue mental health careers. This year, we will:
—Support our new cohort of Listeners at ATC, who will begin working shifts this fall. —Provide mentorship to build participants’ confidence to conduct outreach in their communities.
—Recruit a third cohort to start training in the spring at ATC or another similarly diverse school. Additionally, because the initiative increases Teen Line’s total number of volunteers, we expect the hotline to serve up to 10% more teens this year.

Didi Hirsch’s Career Development Initiative builds upon established services whose metrics will help assess this project’s impact. We evaluate Teen Line’s programmatic success through a survey asking all contacts if they found the service helpful and if they would recommend it to a friend. We anticipate at least 90% of respondents will reply affirmatively to both questions. We also conduct a post-training survey that assesses our Listeners’ mental health knowledge, attitudes and behaviors and expect to see statistically significant improvements in these areas. All that said, the initiative is still in the pilot stage. As such, we have not yet accumulated the data necessary to report on whether we have achieved our short- and long-term objectives and we are working to identify the best metrics for assessing the project’s long-term effectiveness.